Our February speaker will be Kathleen Founds, who will talk about making decisions regarding when to continue or when to pause a work in progress, in her presentation titled "Holding on and Letting Go: A Timeline for Writing Your Novel."
Founds’ first novel, When Mystical Creatures Attack!, is a cleverly written “novel in stories,” about an idealistic teacher who has a nervous breakdown, then corresponds, with her former students, from an inpatient psychiatric facility. Some stories within the novel were inspired by her experience teaching writing to women at Hope House, a halfway house in Redwood City for women struggling with addiction. The novel, published in 2014 by the University of Iowa Press, was listed as a New York Times notable book, and received the University of Iowa John Simmons short fiction award.
Based on the favorable response to her first novel, agents were eager to see more of her work, and she began a second novel, The Ghost Mom’s Guide to the Afterlife. However, she didn’t have the time, space, or money to express her ideas adequately, so she made the tough decision to set it aside. With a sense of thwarted potential, she didn’t see a path for how to finish writing it. However, instead of giving up altogether, she turned her attention to a more personal project, which ultimately became the graphic novel Bipolar Bear & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Health Insurance: a Fable for Grownups. The events of the novel were largely based on her experience fighting for the treatment she needed for her bipolar disorder. Following that novel’s publication in 2022, and after a long journey of writing, letting go, and overcoming obstacles, Founds was finally ready to complete the novel she had started almost a decade earlier. The Ghost Mom’s Guide to the Afterlife is now on its way to publication in the coming year, and the members of her critique group, the Rough Drafts, are confident that it will be worth the wait.
Founds grew up in Santa Cruz county, the daughter of two nurses who worked at Watsonville Community Hospital. She attended public schools before receiving a scholarship to Santa Catalina High, a private Catholic girls’ school in Monterey. She received a BA in Creative Writing and Religious Studies from Stanford, where she studied with many renowned authors. Tobias Wolff was among the first to take notice of her potential as a writer. Upon graduation, she joined a year-long service program, landing as a dropout prevention counselor at a middle school in southern Texas. Her experience there served to derail her original plan to become a social worker who does writing on the side, and she instead decided to become a full-time writer. She was accepted at the prestigious creative writing program at Syracuse University, where she studied with one of her favorite authors, George Saunders. After receiving her MFA, she moved with her husband to Ohio, and began teaching at the local community college, which was fulfilling in a way similar to how she felt when volunteering at Hope House. Upon moving back to California, she took a position in the English department at Cabrillo College, where she has been teaching fiction writing and basic English for the past 14 years.
In addition to her novels, Founds has written many shorter works, which have appeared in publications such as The Sun, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker Online, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Salon, and in the anthology My Name Was Never Frankenstein. As if she weren’t already busy enough with writing and teaching, she is now the PTA president for the middle school her older daughter attends.
Join us on a fascinating journey with the fabulous Kathleen Founds, in which she recounts navigating the dual challenges of writing fiction and wrangling with the American health insurance system. The meeting takes place on Saturday, February 14 at 10:30 a.m. at the Saratoga Senior Center, located at 19655 Allendale Ave in Saratoga.